Death Cab For Cutie Channel Wilco, 'Saw' (But Not 'Twilight') On Next LP

Chris Walla says the album's 'timeline is sort of getting pushed into the future' because of 'New Moon' hoopla.

Death Cab for Cutie already have some experience with the whole "original song for a movie" thing (by now you are surely aware that their "Meet Me on the Equinox" served as the lead single from the "New Moon" soundtrack), but by the sound of things, it seems like they're about ready for a career change.

On Wednesday night at the mtvU Woodie Awards — where Death Cab performed "Equinox" — MTV News got a chance to speak with them about their plans for life post-"Twilight." And, as it turns out, they've got even more soundtrack work on the horizon.

"We've got Death Cab stuff at some point in 2010. We sort of need to figure out when we're going to do it. We're thinking of taking the whole 'bloody and loose' concept to another level," DCFC guitarist Chris Walla said, in reference to his now-famous quote about the band's 2008 album Narrow Stairs. "Because I think 'Saw 8' is happening, so we're working on a song for the soundtrack of 'Saw 8.' So we're continuing on with the 'bloody' thing."

He's joking, obviously. But Walla did say the next Death Cab album will maintain some of the live-and-loose feel of Stairs only this time with an added focus on — as he put it — the "polish-y" side of things. And Wilco.

"I think probably [we'll be] continuing with the 'everybody live in a room' theme, but sort of — you know what I really dug? The last Wilco record," he said. "I think they took the thing that had happened on the previous record, where it was really live, and took the parts of that that worked really well but pulled back from the 'really live' a little bit to sort of concentrate and overdub in a couple of different spots, to concentrate on it and produce it and get it a little more polish-y.

"Narrow Stairs, I thought, was a really logical extreme, like we took the live thing as far as we could probably take it," he continued. "Every record is a learning experience, so maybe pulling back a bit from that and trying something else."

Walla added that there's no real timeline for when Death Cab will begin serious work on the new album. It seems their schedule has been a bit crowded recently, something you can blame on "New Moon."

"It's all demos at this point, and they are mostly kind of scratchy, unfinished demos. Ben [Gibbard]'s been writing and sort of getting back into it," Walla said. "The thing is, the whole idea with this time, was that we were going to finish touring in July and the end of the year was going to be sort of writing and decompressing. But the 'New Moon' thing happened, and it's like, we've all been busy. It's just been busy, it's been crazy. So I think the whole timeline is sort of getting pushed into the future a little bit."

Don't miss the 2009 mtvU Woodie Awards, airing on December 4 at 10 p.m. on MTV, MTV2 and mtvU!